This morning, the humidity readings and temperature readings all checked out. So, I loaded 10 quail eggs into the incubator. The quail eggs will be kept at 99.5 F and 45% relative humidity for 15 days. During that time, the motor drive in the incubator will roll the eggs back and forth. On day 15 […]
We currently have only a small incubator because we mostly hatch quail. It holds more 20-24 quail eggs and that has been sufficient. When we use it for chicken eggs, it holds 9 or 10. When we expand our business I will build a cabinet-style incubator and a separate hatching cabinet, but we aren’t at
Incubator Experiment Read More »
When I arrived to take care of the birds in the new pen, I discovered the black cockerel patrolling the perimeter. He was in no distress so I let him continue on while I was inside dealing with the food and water. When I saw him approaching the door, I opened it and stepped away.
We moved the first group of birds to the new pen in the afternoon. In this group there were nine of the smallest Big Red Broilers and three accidental roosters from the pullet pen. The broilers are so large, now, that they desperately needed more space. The pen has almost four times the area of
Filling the New Pen Read More »
Today, we harvested six male quail from our flock. We should have done it sooner, but this summer has been full of delays. Now that we are ready to move the chickens to the new pen on the farm site, we had to take care of these quail. Why are those things connected? Well… the
One of the reasons for our purchase of the farm site is that the land is zoned for agriculture. Currently, our operation is based on land that is zoned for general commercial use or residential use. Keeping chickens on these lots is legal (we checked!), but people live nearby and we don’t want to be
The New Chicken Pen Read More »
The smoke from nearby forest fires kept us indoors for a week. After that, the rain began. At first, it was welcomed because it was mitigating the smoke and putting out the forest fires. Unfortunately, the rain continued until it wore out its welcome. We had been making decent progress on the driveway at our